Christianity Today has a short but interesting article on blogs. It starts with this:
As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol's famous aphorism was modified to read, "In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people." Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.
Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported earlier this year that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer told reporters. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Given the average lifespan of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, Gartner says blogging has probably peaked.
Which isn't to say that blogging is dead. Quite the opposite. Blog aggregator Technorati estimates that 3 million new blogs are launched every month. The site's tongue-in-cheek slogan: "Zillions of photos, videos, blogs, and more. Some of them have to be good."
Actually, some Christian blogs are very good. What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.
Well, maybe, but I think a bigger problem is exposure. With so many blogs out there it really is hard to get noticed, and it's difficult to work hard at producing either quality or frequency when the feeling that you're just writing for yourself is creeping all over you.
Nevertheless, we here at Viewpoint keep plugging away, hoping that if you see something that interests you you'll link us to friends and that perhaps by word of mouth, so to speak, we'll gradually grow. Meanwhile, we continue to strive to bring you both quality and frequency. Thanks for reading us and telling others about us.
RLC
